Book Review: Schools for Life: The Grundtvigian Folk Schools in America by Enok Mortensen

and power is measured by the agglomeration of identifiable people into
perceivable groups. But recent emigration research has consistently shown,
indeed, stressed the diversity of causes behind the emigrations and, hence,
of the emigrants themselves. Chapter Five deals with the 1930s, clearly the
critical decade in recent Swedish history, in which a renewed decline in
the birth-rate again raised political questions, one response to which was
the great expansion of the public sector. This was, too, the period of
the long-delayed emergence of a Swedish industrial society with the con­sequent
increase in the urban and industrial population at the expense of
the rural and agricultural one. Further, this was the decade in which the
number of immigrants into Sweden for the first time exceeded the num­ber
of emigrants, a trend which has not yet ceased. It was especially i n ­teresting
to learn here that Swedish immigration policy in the 1920s was
as restrictive as American policy during the same period, and that the
arguments used in favor of such a policy have a much-too familiar ring
about them (see pp. 95-96).
Chapter Six sketches the development of Swedish welfare philosophy,
and Chapter Seven muses on the dilemmas of demographic forecasting.
Chapters Eight through Ten contain three scenarios of a future Sweden,
of which that in Chapter Nine is the most interesting for migration his­torians,
positing, as it does, a Sweden of large-scale immigration and guess­ing
at possible consequences. Those interested in comparing the American
experience with that of Sweden will find these chapters useful for their
theoretical models. Chapter Eleven, "Outlooks and Insights," attempts to
summarize the book and raise some future questions (e. g. Are international
parallels useful? Answer—yes and no.)
Though grounded in a statistical approach, this book is accessible to
the non-statistician. Its chief rhetorical fault is that it often reads like
an outline, especially in Chapter Five, which leaves far too many fruitful
ideas undeveloped. Then, too, terms are occasionally undefined, as with
the notion in Chapter Six of the "integration philosophy" of welfare, but
I suspect this is related to a third problem: the authors themselves evi­dently
wrote their own translation and the result is a certain stodginess
and occasional near-misses. For instance, it seems likely that the Swedish
term kärnfamilj lies behind the authors' n u c l e u s f a m i l y instead of the
usual n u c l e a r f a m i l y . These are, however, tolerable deficiencies. Surpris­ingly,
for all the discussion of population from the political perspective,
the authors refrain from suggesting any political conclusions, preferring
instead a more neutral historical distance. One final word for librarians,
my copy of this book literally fell apart as I read it.
A L A N SWANSON
A u g u s t a n a C o l l e ge
Enok Mortensen. S C H O O L S F O R L I F E : T H E G R U N D T V I G I A N F O LK
S C H O O L S I N A M E R I C A . Askov, Minn.: Danish American Heritage So­ciety,
1977. 142 pp. $5.00.
"While Swedish and Norwegian immigrants founded academic institu-
293
tions as their first centers of learning," the author observes, "the Danes
established folk schools." These followed the pattern of the folkehøjskoler
in Denmark: non-credit schools where young adults could receive cultural
enrichment in a rural, residential setting. Five such schools were estab­lished
in the United States and one in Canada between 1878 and 1921, while
attempts were made to found several others. Their story is here told by
Enok Mortensen, who was intimately associated with them as student,
teacher, and ultimately rector.
He begins with the origins of the folk school movement in Denmark
from 1844, inspired by Bishop N . F. S. Grundtvig. While the idea spread
to the other Nordic countries, Grundtvigian Lutheranism, with its cheerful
affirmation of this God-given life on earth, remained distinctively Danish
and provided the particular idealism of the movement as it was carried
across the Atlantic.
There follow the stories of the individual Danish-American folk schools,
whose dedicated leaders struggled constantly with the pitifully meager re­sources
that pioneer immigrant communities could provide. They and their
teachers comprised a small group of idealists, most of them Lutheran pas­tors
and themselves the products of folk schools in Denmark, who appear
and reappear in the stories of the different schools and who formed a
close-knit world of their own. The schools' enrollments ranged from
a half dozen to a little over a hundred at the most: during their roughly
sixty-year existence Mortensen estimates that some ten to twelve thousand
people attended in all, or only a small part of the Danish-American pop­ulation.
Most of the folk schools finally went under during the Depression; only
at Danebod, near Tyler, Minnesota, are the buildings still standing, where
in 1947 the author organized an annual family summer camp, now the
last remnant of the Danish-American folk school movement. Yet their
days were numbered from the end of large-scale immigration in the 1920s.
Originating in Denmark largely as a defensive reaction to militant Ger­manism
in the mid-nineteenth century, they remained too inflexibly Danish
to continue to appeal to American-born generations. They were purpose­fully
located in small rural communities of Danish immigrants, which could
not remain closed to the larger society around them or retain many of
their young people. Yet their supporters clung to the Grundtvigian ideal
and stoutly resisted turning them into preparatory academies or colleges
to fit the American educational system.
For those associated with them, they nonetheless proved veritable "schools
for life," in Grundtvig's own words. In the 1930s C. P. Højbjerg at Nysted
in Nebraska could still look forward to the prospect of ten thousand folk
schools throughout America. At that very time American educational re­formers
began, under Danish inspiration, to experiment with similar
schools in rural Michigan, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Since then
interest in various forms of adult education has continued to spread and
the author concludes that the folk-school ideal, adapted to American con-
294
ditions, may yet provide us with a means to discovery of our cultural
identity as individuals and as a nation.
This is the first book to be published by the newly founded Danish
American Heritage Society, from which it can be ordered directly (29672
Dane Lane, Junction City, Oregon 97448). We look forward to others as
interesting, well-researched, and readable as this one.
H. ARNOLD BARTON
S o u t h e r n I l l i n o i s U n i v e r s i ty
Michael G. Karni, Matti E. Kaups, and Douglas J . Ollila, Jr., eds. T H E
FINNISH EXPERIENCE IN T H E W E S T E R N GREAT LAKES REGION:
N E W P E R S P E C T I V E S . Publications of the Institute for Migration, Turku,
C 3 (in collaboration with the Immigration History Research Center, Uni­versity
of Minnesota, Minneapolis). Turku: Vammala, 1975. 232 pp.
This quarterly has recently reviewed a number of publications on F i n ­nish
emigration and Finns overseas, reflecting a relatively late but rapidly
developing interest in both Finland and the United States. In 1974 the
first of the conferences on ethnic groups in the upper Midwest sponsored
by the University of Minnesota-Duluth was devoted to the Finns (followed
during the next two years by the Norwegians and Swedes). The papers
presented by five Finnish and eleven American scholars at the 1974 con­ference
comprise the present volume.
The results are impressive, reflecting a high level of objective scholar­ship
and a close awareness of developments in international, interdisci­plinary
migration studies. Following introductory surveys of the new ethnic
history in America by Clark A. Chambers and of emigration research in
Finland by Vilho Niitemaa, the papers concentrate upon certain basic
themes: emigration from Finland (Timo Orta, A . William Hoglund); settle­ment
and occupational patterns, and ethnic institutions in America (Matti
E. Kaups, Arnold Alanen, Walter Kukkonen); political and labor union
radicalism (Michael Passi, Arthur Puotinen, Alvar Wargelin, Douglas O l ­lila,
Jr., Auvo Kostiainen, Michael Karni); and the migration of Finnish
Americans back to Finland and (in the early 1930s) to Soviet Karelia
(Keijo Virtanen, Reino Kero). There is a concluding summary by John
I. Kolehmainen.
The conference did not—and could not—give a fully balanced synopsis
of Finnish-American history. It was strongly focussed upon the western
Great Lakes region, upon Finns employed in mining, and upon immigrant
radicalism. It offered relatively little on Finns in other areas and em­ployments
or on religious life, and almost nothing on cultural institutions,
education, or acculturation. Nor were the Finland-Swedes treated sep­arately,
although their emigration was greater in proportion to their
numbers than that of their Finnish-speaking compatriots and they were
strongly represented in areas of Finnish settlement in America. For i n ­stance,
Matti Kaups, citing Anders Myhrman, estimates that some 20-25%
of the Finns on the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota were Swedish-speaking.
295

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

All rights held by the Swedish-American Historical Society. No part of this publication, except in the case of brief quotations, may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the editor and, where appropriate, the original author(s). For more information, please email the Society at info@swedishamericanhist.org

and power is measured by the agglomeration of identifiable people into
perceivable groups. But recent emigration research has consistently shown,
indeed, stressed the diversity of causes behind the emigrations and, hence,
of the emigrants themselves. Chapter Five deals with the 1930s, clearly the
critical decade in recent Swedish history, in which a renewed decline in
the birth-rate again raised political questions, one response to which was
the great expansion of the public sector. This was, too, the period of
the long-delayed emergence of a Swedish industrial society with the con­sequent
increase in the urban and industrial population at the expense of
the rural and agricultural one. Further, this was the decade in which the
number of immigrants into Sweden for the first time exceeded the num­ber
of emigrants, a trend which has not yet ceased. It was especially i n ­teresting
to learn here that Swedish immigration policy in the 1920s was
as restrictive as American policy during the same period, and that the
arguments used in favor of such a policy have a much-too familiar ring
about them (see pp. 95-96).
Chapter Six sketches the development of Swedish welfare philosophy,
and Chapter Seven muses on the dilemmas of demographic forecasting.
Chapters Eight through Ten contain three scenarios of a future Sweden,
of which that in Chapter Nine is the most interesting for migration his­torians,
positing, as it does, a Sweden of large-scale immigration and guess­ing
at possible consequences. Those interested in comparing the American
experience with that of Sweden will find these chapters useful for their
theoretical models. Chapter Eleven, "Outlooks and Insights," attempts to
summarize the book and raise some future questions (e. g. Are international
parallels useful? Answer—yes and no.)
Though grounded in a statistical approach, this book is accessible to
the non-statistician. Its chief rhetorical fault is that it often reads like
an outline, especially in Chapter Five, which leaves far too many fruitful
ideas undeveloped. Then, too, terms are occasionally undefined, as with
the notion in Chapter Six of the "integration philosophy" of welfare, but
I suspect this is related to a third problem: the authors themselves evi­dently
wrote their own translation and the result is a certain stodginess
and occasional near-misses. For instance, it seems likely that the Swedish
term kärnfamilj lies behind the authors' n u c l e u s f a m i l y instead of the
usual n u c l e a r f a m i l y . These are, however, tolerable deficiencies. Surpris­ingly,
for all the discussion of population from the political perspective,
the authors refrain from suggesting any political conclusions, preferring
instead a more neutral historical distance. One final word for librarians,
my copy of this book literally fell apart as I read it.
A L A N SWANSON
A u g u s t a n a C o l l e ge
Enok Mortensen. S C H O O L S F O R L I F E : T H E G R U N D T V I G I A N F O LK
S C H O O L S I N A M E R I C A . Askov, Minn.: Danish American Heritage So­ciety,
1977. 142 pp. $5.00.
"While Swedish and Norwegian immigrants founded academic institu-
293
tions as their first centers of learning," the author observes, "the Danes
established folk schools." These followed the pattern of the folkehøjskoler
in Denmark: non-credit schools where young adults could receive cultural
enrichment in a rural, residential setting. Five such schools were estab­lished
in the United States and one in Canada between 1878 and 1921, while
attempts were made to found several others. Their story is here told by
Enok Mortensen, who was intimately associated with them as student,
teacher, and ultimately rector.
He begins with the origins of the folk school movement in Denmark
from 1844, inspired by Bishop N . F. S. Grundtvig. While the idea spread
to the other Nordic countries, Grundtvigian Lutheranism, with its cheerful
affirmation of this God-given life on earth, remained distinctively Danish
and provided the particular idealism of the movement as it was carried
across the Atlantic.
There follow the stories of the individual Danish-American folk schools,
whose dedicated leaders struggled constantly with the pitifully meager re­sources
that pioneer immigrant communities could provide. They and their
teachers comprised a small group of idealists, most of them Lutheran pas­tors
and themselves the products of folk schools in Denmark, who appear
and reappear in the stories of the different schools and who formed a
close-knit world of their own. The schools' enrollments ranged from
a half dozen to a little over a hundred at the most: during their roughly
sixty-year existence Mortensen estimates that some ten to twelve thousand
people attended in all, or only a small part of the Danish-American pop­ulation.
Most of the folk schools finally went under during the Depression; only
at Danebod, near Tyler, Minnesota, are the buildings still standing, where
in 1947 the author organized an annual family summer camp, now the
last remnant of the Danish-American folk school movement. Yet their
days were numbered from the end of large-scale immigration in the 1920s.
Originating in Denmark largely as a defensive reaction to militant Ger­manism
in the mid-nineteenth century, they remained too inflexibly Danish
to continue to appeal to American-born generations. They were purpose­fully
located in small rural communities of Danish immigrants, which could
not remain closed to the larger society around them or retain many of
their young people. Yet their supporters clung to the Grundtvigian ideal
and stoutly resisted turning them into preparatory academies or colleges
to fit the American educational system.
For those associated with them, they nonetheless proved veritable "schools
for life," in Grundtvig's own words. In the 1930s C. P. Højbjerg at Nysted
in Nebraska could still look forward to the prospect of ten thousand folk
schools throughout America. At that very time American educational re­formers
began, under Danish inspiration, to experiment with similar
schools in rural Michigan, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Since then
interest in various forms of adult education has continued to spread and
the author concludes that the folk-school ideal, adapted to American con-
294
ditions, may yet provide us with a means to discovery of our cultural
identity as individuals and as a nation.
This is the first book to be published by the newly founded Danish
American Heritage Society, from which it can be ordered directly (29672
Dane Lane, Junction City, Oregon 97448). We look forward to others as
interesting, well-researched, and readable as this one.
H. ARNOLD BARTON
S o u t h e r n I l l i n o i s U n i v e r s i ty
Michael G. Karni, Matti E. Kaups, and Douglas J . Ollila, Jr., eds. T H E
FINNISH EXPERIENCE IN T H E W E S T E R N GREAT LAKES REGION:
N E W P E R S P E C T I V E S . Publications of the Institute for Migration, Turku,
C 3 (in collaboration with the Immigration History Research Center, Uni­versity
of Minnesota, Minneapolis). Turku: Vammala, 1975. 232 pp.
This quarterly has recently reviewed a number of publications on F i n ­nish
emigration and Finns overseas, reflecting a relatively late but rapidly
developing interest in both Finland and the United States. In 1974 the
first of the conferences on ethnic groups in the upper Midwest sponsored
by the University of Minnesota-Duluth was devoted to the Finns (followed
during the next two years by the Norwegians and Swedes). The papers
presented by five Finnish and eleven American scholars at the 1974 con­ference
comprise the present volume.
The results are impressive, reflecting a high level of objective scholar­ship
and a close awareness of developments in international, interdisci­plinary
migration studies. Following introductory surveys of the new ethnic
history in America by Clark A. Chambers and of emigration research in
Finland by Vilho Niitemaa, the papers concentrate upon certain basic
themes: emigration from Finland (Timo Orta, A . William Hoglund); settle­ment
and occupational patterns, and ethnic institutions in America (Matti
E. Kaups, Arnold Alanen, Walter Kukkonen); political and labor union
radicalism (Michael Passi, Arthur Puotinen, Alvar Wargelin, Douglas O l ­lila,
Jr., Auvo Kostiainen, Michael Karni); and the migration of Finnish
Americans back to Finland and (in the early 1930s) to Soviet Karelia
(Keijo Virtanen, Reino Kero). There is a concluding summary by John
I. Kolehmainen.
The conference did not—and could not—give a fully balanced synopsis
of Finnish-American history. It was strongly focussed upon the western
Great Lakes region, upon Finns employed in mining, and upon immigrant
radicalism. It offered relatively little on Finns in other areas and em­ployments
or on religious life, and almost nothing on cultural institutions,
education, or acculturation. Nor were the Finland-Swedes treated sep­arately,
although their emigration was greater in proportion to their
numbers than that of their Finnish-speaking compatriots and they were
strongly represented in areas of Finnish settlement in America. For i n ­stance,
Matti Kaups, citing Anders Myhrman, estimates that some 20-25%
of the Finns on the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota were Swedish-speaking.
295